Puppy Distro

[demosthene1]

I have fooled around with lots of distros, and Puppy was one of my early experiments. That was a while ago. After much distro hopping I finally settled on Ubuntu as my main, series OS.

I've just installed the latest Puppy on the same USB hard drive as Ubuntu. It resides in it's own folder,no need to partition the drive. It runs great.

I am always surprised by Puppy. It is very small and very fast and yet, out of the box, with much less lines of code, outshines Ubuntu on so many things, such as multimedia support. It all just works. Flash, mpegs, mp3, DVD movies, they all play without searching for plugins or hasseling installation problems. I understand the Ubuntu philosophy about such things but in real life, isn't something that just works without the hassle a big plus?

Hardware detection is superior too. The latest Puppy distro easily found everything and configured it in a superior manner to almost any distro I've tried.

This very tiny and fast distro, in my opinion, is a work of genius that should inspire other distro communities to be aware of bloated code and overly complex procedures to accomplish simple tasks.

[smartboyathome]

I'm surprised with puppy as well. It is one of the few distros which loads my PCMCIA ethernet card on my old laptop (for some reason, others don't seem to find it).

[wolfen69]

i agree that puppy is great and does alot of things well, but do you realize that only a handful of linux distros come with codecs and such preinstalled? windows does not, mac does not, and most linux distros do not.
Flash, mpegs, mp3, DVD movies, they all play without searching for plugins or hasseling installation problems. why is this a hassle? it takes me 1 minute to get all the codecs, flash and java installed. no big deal.

the reason most OS's do not come with them is because of legal concerns. they don't want to **** off the wrong people. if installing codecs is a big problem for you, just use kiwi linux. it is basically regular ubuntu (even use the same theme) and has most codecs, flash and java preinstalled. problem solved.

[demosthene1]

Getting the multimedia running in another OS can be a hassle or not. For the most part it is not. I found that my XP computer would not natively play DVD movies. I can remember being a bit surprised at that. You are right, many Operating Systems don't have multimedia capability.

Fedora takes some digging around to find the "ugly" plugins since they are not in their repository as they are in Ubuntu. Mandriva has no objections to including the nonfree codecs in their live One version.

Here is where I get frustrated. I was replacing Windows with Hardy on a friends computer. I wanted multimedia to work for him so I installed all the necessary plugins. Everything was fine until I tried installing Flash. I don't know what the problem was but could never get it going on his computer. On my computer it is fine.

Anyway, I'm posting this from Puppy...been playing around with it for days. It is fun and surprising! Brings the Geek out in me. I love the leanness of the system. In fact, it was the bloated excess of Vista that pointed me to Linux as an OS to be taken very seriously for everyday computing, not just an occasional experiment.

[nitehawk777]

I've been a Puppy user for quite awhile, myself. It just does most of the things I need to do. However,..sometimes trying to find apps and such can take some "digging" (you have to search their forum,..and sometimes the repositories are down),...but Puppy is sort of my mainstay. With dialup,..getting the codecs in Ubuntu can take quite awhile,....(but it can be worth the effort). I'm a big "Puppy Fan" though.

[fiddler616]

I understand the Ubuntu philosophy about such things but in real life, isn't something that just works without the hassle a big plus?
I'm pretty sure this is why Linux Mint exists.

[exploder]

I ahve been exploring light distributions for old computers. I have had sucess with TinyFlux but this thread has given me good information on Puppy Linux. I am going to have to try Puppy on the next computer I salvage. Thanks guys!

[MaxIBoy]

I wouldn't use Puppy as my main distro, because I don't feel comfortable running around as root all the time, I prefer APT, and I like Ubuntu's extensive repository. However, the liveCD is excellent! I booted it off a CD, on a Pentium II with 128 Mb RAM and a Voodoo 3DFX, and it ran about as fast as my laptop's Ubuntu installation!

[wolfen69]

i had puppy on a 400mhz, 160mb ram laptop and it ran great. wireless and everything worked perfect.

there is also puppy "retro" that can be used on even older computers. gotta love it.

one last thing. i also have pupeee (for the EeePC) on a usb stick. my mini laptop runs like greased lightning with it. awesome stuff.

[Mishabuntu]

I agree that Puppy Linux is a pretty amazing mini distro. I have Puppy Linux installed on a USB flash drive. I have mainly used it for its handy tools. Toolbox on a USB flash drive.
The distros repository pup files are not fun to browse through.

It's great for what it is though, a great mini distro.

[spcwingo]

I too have had nothing but great experiences with Puppy. I am currently running a "home-rolled" version of 4.0 on an ancient Compaq Armada 1592DMT sporting a Pentium I @ 233Mhz, 98MB ram and a 3GB HDD. Everything works on this old gal...even wireless (using ndiswrapper). The kicker is it runs even faster than any of the 32 bit dos based windows (95, 98, ME).

[exploder]

I appreciate the comments on hardware used with Puppy. I salvage old machines and this kind of information really helps me out a lot!

[fiddler616]

Hmm...I've just gotten two old machines, and I was kind of avoiding Puppy (I think I misread the RAM requirements, now that I think about it). So I went DSL->Ubuntu GTK 1.2 Remix->Ubuntu Server...I think I'll add Puppy to that list, just to see how it goes.

[LordSmight]

I also agree that Puppy is a very good distro and in my opinion the greatest of the small Linux distrobutions. It runs very well on my brother's 128mbRAM laptop. It instantly recognized all external hardware and the internal wifi card.

[fiddler616]

128mbRAM laptop.
The problem I had was that when I enter the BIOS, the system stats are displayed, and I saw "64MB RAM" and thought "shoot!"...and neglected to see the additional "64MB extended RAM".

[spcwingo]

If you would like to check out my version, I have it upped to mediafire. Here's the link:

download (http://www.mediafire.com/file/kum2iz2z2id/macpup-wingo-400.zip)

It comes zipped with md5 (mediafire won't let you upload an iso). Let me know what you think if you decide to try it.